hitachi

Early stage venture firm, Draper Nexus, has closed its second fund at $175 million, according to Managing Director Q Motiwala. Its debut fund closed in 2013, at $50 million.
Limited partners in Draper Nexus are global tech conglomerates, primarily based in Japan.
For its second fund, the firm signed up about 20 LP’s including Panasonic, Hitachi, Kyocera, Shimizu, NEC, Canon and others. Read More

Robots are friends! Or at least, at Haneda Airport if you see one of the little buddies above, you can feel confident approaching it and ask it for help. The Hitachi EMIEW3 humanoid robot begins its first proof-of-concept tests at the major international airport in Tokyo today, opening in Passenger Terminal 2 and providing helpful info to travellers in both English and Japanese.
The EMIEW3 is… Read More

Here’s the dirty little secret about the Internet of Things: The things might not work, and you might not use them. As a consumer, many of your gadgets will collect dust tucked away in a drawer. As a business, many of your devices will not perform as well as expected, turning into maintenance-heavy money pits. Read More

Wearables currently decipher physiological biometrics — heart rate, pulse, caloric intake. But in the coming years, we’ll see emotion-sensing wearable technology that clues us into specific human emotions. When this data is shared across networks, we’ll enter the dawn of the “Emotional Internet.” Read More

Two big Japanese electronics companies, namely Hitachi and Mitsubishi, are to stop producing parts of their product portfolio domestically: Hitachi announced [JP] it will end production of plasma and LCD TVs in Japan, marketed under the Wooo brand, by September this year.
The company owns a plant in Gifu prefecture in central Japan that churns out about 100,000 TVs per month (pictured: a… Read More

The deal has been in the making for months, but today Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi made the mega merger official. The three companies signed definitive agreements with the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ) to integrate their small- and medium-sized display businesses.
Under the deal, semi-public INCJ will hold 70% of Japan Display, Inc., a new company that will run the operations. Read More

The CEATEC 2011 exhibition in Japan is just one day away, and Hitachi is already showing one of its coolest products: the company has been working on glasses-free 3D projection systems for years and is apparently making progress.
The newest version [JP] uses a set of 24 projectors, lenses, translucent half mirrors to superimpose 3D images on an object in the real-world. In the picture above… Read More

Back in February this year, Hitachi Displays took the wraps off a super-advanced LCD for smartphones that boasted a 4.5-inch IPS LCD with 720 x 1,280 resolution. Fast forward to today, and the company is now announcing [JP] the development of a very similar panel with (almost) the same quality that costs “10-20%” less than touch displays currently used in smartphones.
This new… Read More

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Yesterday, we reported about Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba planning to establish a joint venture for small and mid-size LCD panels in Japan. And today, the three companies, plus major shareholder Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, made the plan official.
As reported, the semi-public organization will control 70% of the venture (to be set up by the end of the year), with the other… Read More

Quite big news from Sony, Hitachi, and Toshiba today: according to Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun [JP], the three companies today decided to merge their LCD businesses, at least for smaller and mid-sized screens used in smartphones, handheld gaming devices and tablets.
If the report is to be believed, a joint venture will be set up by the end of the year. What’s interesting is that… Read More

Just last week, Hitachi decided to pull the plug on their domestic TV production business by year-end, but that doesn’t mean the company doesn’t go out with a bang. A total of six Hitachi Wooo TVs were announced [JP] in Japan today, with the 50-inch 3D model P50-GP08 stealing the show. Read More

After Pioneer decided to shut down its TV business in 2009, Hitachi yesterday announced they are ready to stop producing and outsourcing all production of TVs to makers in Taiwan and other Asian countries. And even though Hitachi said they will continue selling TVs in the future, this sounds very much like a long goodbye. Read More

Hitachi announced [JP] a new mobile 3D screen today: the IPS-based LCD is sized at a respectable 4.5 inches, doesn’t require glasses to view pictures in 3D and has 400 cd/m2 brightness in 2D mode and 470 cd/m2 brightness in 3D mode. But perhaps the biggest selling point is the fantastic resolution of 1,280×720. Read More

While the nuances of this enormous, enormous business deal are certainly lost on this poor tech blogger, I thought it worthwhile to mention that three major Japanese tech companies are considering merging their LCD production divisions, presumably to compete more effectively against major rivals like Samsung, Panasonic, Sharp, and big Chinese OEMs.
What would the result be? Probably even… Read More

It’s nice to have a few hundred gigabytes in your bag and when the first guys to the wireless hard drive party, Seagate, released the Satellite, they piqued my interest by allowing those gigabytes to be streamed onto iOS devices as well as almost any laptop or cellphone. Now, however, Hitachi seems to have hit the sweet spot with their wireless drive with built-in access point and… Read More

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (which was just acquired by Western Digital) has announced the company’s first USB 3.0 external hard drives, the so-called Touro Mobile Pro Portable Drive and the Touro Desk Pro External Drive (the bigger one in the picture). What’s special about these devices is the personal cloud-based back up solution they come with. Read More

Hitachi announced [JP] the CP-A300NJ (pictured) and the CP-AW250NJ today, the latest addition to their short-focus projector line-up. What’s special about these two models is that they are, according to Hitachi, “the world’s smallest and lightest” short-focus projectors: the devices are sized at W345×H85×D303mm and weigh just 3.8kg. Read More

Never heard of iVDR? You are probably not alone. The iVDR (Information Versatile Disk for Removable usage) standard for portable HDD carts was established in 2002 by eight top Japanese electronics companies, but it never caught on. One of these companies was Hitachi, which still produces these devices, for example the iS500 announced [JP, PDF] today. Read More

Hitachi subsidiary Hitachi Displays yesterday announced [JP] that it has developed a new LCD display for smartphones whose quality reaches the “limit of what is discernible to the human eye”. And a look at the spec sheet reveals that big H is indeed prepping quite a display. Read More